[The first thing Sanguinius did when he returned to the Red Tear was call the entire Legion to assembly.]
[The fleet held position in the void above Signus Prime's scorched atmosphere, the Blood Angels warships hanging in formation, and Sanguinius stood before them all and announced you to them as the last Primarch recovered by the Imperium and the Emperor's heir. You stood beside him and felt the weight of it settle across your shoulders like armour being fastened on. You had a fair sense of what the Primarch was actually doing: he was placing you under the protection of his Legion's regard, making your status a matter of public record across the fleet so that it would be difficult for anything to happen to you quietly. It was a thoughtful gesture, which was entirely in keeping with what you had learned of him.]
[You did not refuse it.]
[The Warp routes back to Terra were closed. The Navigators had been clear on this: the storm systems that had warped through the empyrean in the wake of the Heresy's opening moves had made the direct passage to the Throneworld unreadable, the Astronomican's light obscured by something much closer and much louder than distance. The starlight over Terra itself had vanished from the Navigators' inner sight.]
[Then the Pharos on Sotha lit.]
[The five-hundredth world of the realm of Ultramar, Sotha, and its ancient alien lighthouse answered the darkness the way a single candle answered a room, which was to say not adequately, but definitively. The Navigators could read it. The fleet could follow it.]
[You consulted with Sanguinius. The Blood Angels' predetermined course had been toward Ultramar before Signus Prime had intervened, and Ultramar was where the Pharos was burning. The discussion was brief and the conclusion was the same one you had both reached independently: the fleet would go where the Pharos pointed, and it would go where its Primarch had always intended to take it, and those two directions were the same.]
[The Geller fields went up across the fleet. The void outside the viewports became the interior of the Warp, and the voyage began.]
[You had the technical serfs work on the power armour while you talked.]
[You told Sanguinius about the Warp. Its origin, its nature, the four powers that had grown in it from the emotional output of conscious beings across the galaxy, each one a god formed from feeling, each one now old enough to be self-sustaining and self-interested. You told him about what was coming, about the shape of the wars that would follow the Heresy, about the long dark that would settle over the Imperium if nothing changed. You spoke for a long time. He listened without interrupting.]
[When you finished, his face was still for a long time.]
]"When we reach Ultramar," he said finally, "you will need to tell all of this to Roboute."]
[He said it without elaboration and you understood why: of all the Primarchs who remained loyal, Guilliman was the one who would hear this kind of information and immediately begin working out what to do with it. A mind built for administration and strategy at the largest scale, applied to the largest possible problem. If there was a plan to be made that might actually bend the future in a different direction, Guilliman was the one most likely to build it correctly.]
[The voyage deepened.]
[The Geller fields held. The fleet moved through the Warp without incident for the first weeks, the empyrean turbulent outside the fields but unable to find purchase on the ships inside them. Then, partway through the second month, the crew began to change.]
[It was not the Geller fields failing. The integrity readings stayed steady. But among the mortal crew members, you started to see the signs you recognised from other contexts: the particular quality of someone who had been touched by something that came from outside the physical, the look that preceded behaviour that would kill other people if left unchecked. Subspace corruption, moving through the human population of the fleet like slow fire through dry material, the Chaos powers working what leverage they had through the soft tissue of mortal minds because the field would not let them in through any harder route.]
[They did not want this voyage to complete.]
[You brought it to Sanguinius. The action required was the same action it always required, and it was not pleasant, and it was necessary. The Blood Angels moved through the affected sections of the fleet quickly and with the professionalism that defined them even in tasks like this one. You led the clearance of your own sections. The mortal crew members who had been reached were reached too deeply to recover, and you and the Blood Angels gave them the ending that was the only mercy available.]
[In the second month, the Geller fields fell away naturally as the fleet broke back into real space.]
[You emerged into the Ultima Segmentum intact. All of you. The fleet had come through the Warp without losing a single warship, which was not the standard outcome for Warp travel in this period, and both you and Sanguinius noted the improbability of it without being able to explain it. Something had smoothed the passage. You did not know what, and neither did he.]
[Sotha was ahead. Ultramar was ahead. The Pharos burned on the edge of sensor range, patient and ancient and indifferent to how long it had been waiting.]
[The Red Tear's internal vox net crackled.]
[Blood Angels, Third Deck, starboard passage. The words came in fragmented, the signal cut by interference that had no obvious source. Then, nothing.]
[You reached the location before most of the response team. What had been an Astartes patrol squad was there, which was to say the remains of it were there. The power armour was piled to one side, separated from its wearers with a precision that was not a byproduct of violence but the point of it. The crew members were displayed on the bulkheads, the ceiling, the deck grating, arranged with the particular aesthetic of someone who had done this many times and had opinions about the presentation.]
[Sanguinius arrived at your shoulder. You heard the quality of his silence before you heard anything else.]
[You looked at the displayed dead and felt the cold that came with recognition rather than shock.]
["We don't need to guess." You kept your voice even. "This is Konrad Curze."]
[Sanguinius said nothing. The white wings had not spread but the muscles in them were rigid.]
["I wondered whether Chaos had a second stage prepared after Ka'Bandha failed." You turned to look at Sanguinius directly. "Curze has become their instrument for this part. He believes it's personal, which makes him more dangerous and also, potentially, reachable." A pause. "Brother, listen to me on this: I need you to try not to kill him. If he can be turned back, if one more Legion can be pulled from Horus's side, the effect on what's coming is significant. I know what he's done. I know what he is. But try."]
[You held his gaze.]
["I can't promise that," Sanguinius said. His voice was very quiet. "I can promise that I'll try."]
[It was the honest answer. You accepted it.]
[The Angel Guard appeared at the corridor junction and presented the Spear of Telesto to Sanguinius without being asked. He took it. You drew the Heart of the Furnace from your freshly repaired armour's holster, the plasma weapon warm in your grip. The Blood Scythe was already in your other hand.]
[Sanguinius ordered the Legion into defensive configuration: bridge sealed and fortified, all primary and secondary command stations doubled in guard strength, the engine sections locked down and guarded independently. Curze could not take the ship, but he could cause damage that neither of you wanted, and preventing that damage was more important than chasing him.]
[Then the two of you swept the Red Tear from bow to stern.]
[Every compartment. Every maintenance tunnel and ventilation shaft wide enough to admit an Astartes. Every cargo hold and weapons bay and crew quarter. The two of you moved through the ship like a tide going through a house, thorough and systematic, and found nothing.]
[Not a trace of him. Not a footprint in dust, not a thermal signature that resolved into a shape, not a scent that held long enough to follow. You had hunted things across the surface of Signus Prime in worse conditions, and this was a controlled internal environment with a finite number of hiding places, and you found nothing.]
[You paused in a corridor junction in the lower decks and considered the possibility that you had been wrong.]
[Then you dismissed it. The display on the third deck was unmistakably his work. He was somewhere on this ship, which meant he was somewhere that neither of you had thought to check as a hiding space, or he had moved as you moved, staying always in the section you had just finished searching.]
[Either option was consistent with what Konrad Curze was.]
[The vox blared.]
[Bridge alert. Unknown contact, closing on the bridge. Too large for standard Astartes. Too fast.]
[Sanguinius moved the instant the transmission finished, the wings spreading in the confines of the corridor, the golden armour already accelerating. You watched him go, the massive shape receding around the curve of the passageway, and you took one step to follow him and stopped.]
[Something in the quality of the air.]
[You stood still and let your senses work without interference. The smell of the ship, recycled atmosphere, machine oil, the particular metallic undertone of a warship that had been in extended operation. Underneath those things, something that did not belong to any of them. Very faint. The specific smell of blood that had been cooled to near-ambient temperature and held there for a long time. Not a wound. Something older. Something that had been present here for longer than the patrol squad had been dead.]
[A diversion.]
["Konrad." You said it at normal volume, to the empty corridor. "You didn't come alone, did you. Someone else hit the bridge to pull Sanguinius forward, and you stayed back." You did not turn around. "I think you and I have been moving in the same spaces for quite some time."]
[The silence lasted long enough that you had time to wonder if the smell had misled you.]
[Then a sound came from the darkness behind you. Not a footstep. The deliberate sound of someone allowing themselves to be heard, the specific choice of a person who had been choosing not to be heard for however long they had been there, and who was now choosing differently.]
["Dog," a voice said. Low, dry, carrying a particular weight of disdain that had been cultivated over centuries. "The sense of smell. I should have accounted for it more carefully."]
[You turned.]
[The figure that assembled itself from the darkness of the corridor behind you was wearing dark blue ceramite covered in what had been used as ornamentation, if ornamentation meant fragments and remnants and reminders arranged with care. A scarlet cloak moved in the recycled air of the corridor. The face in the shadows was the face of something that had looked into the future and had seen its own death there and had spent every year since then deciding what to do with the time before it arrived.]
[Konrad Curze. The Night Haunter. The eighth Primarch of the Emperor's Legion, standing six metres away in the corridor of his brother's flagship.]
["Let me be very clear with you," he said. The voice had no warmth in it but it had a great deal of precision. "What comes next is between the two of us. This is not the Chaos gods' business and it is not Sanguinius's business." The shadows moved around him in the particular way that shadows moved around Curze. "You stabbed me in the back once. I intend to return the courtesy."]
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